Not quite sure who started the idea, but somehow, Van, Brook, Oliver, and eventually Mark decided to do an online comic. With initial drawings and concepts from Brook, everyone (except Mark who sat there giving critiques to the three the whole time) began doing a bit of artwork.

As you will notice, the first few comics aren't really too great in comedic value. The reason is that we merely threw in inside-jokes as "space-fillers" in order for us to get used to the artwork... all those early comics were basically us practicing.

If you look at the archives, you'll also notice that JELLY... JELLY!!! was the last comic to be up in 2001 and the next comic was New Years, 2002... five months later. As it turned out, we made our characters a bit too complex for ourselves to easily duplicated and thus, whenever we had a comic, our laziness would get the better of us when we thought of how much work it would require for us to draw JUST ONE person in another position. At that time, it would take us up to a few HOURS to complete just one character to our satisfaction. I believe the character that took us the longest and turned out the best was "Oliver's Dream Girl" who never actually showed up in a comic until much later in ZZZzzzzzz. There's a story that goes along with "her" too... but I'll leave that for another time. ;)

MrTechHappy?

As it seems, "MrTechHappy" has nothing to do with the comic at all. And... you'd be pretty much correct if you made that assumption. Oliver, Chad, and Van competed in BPA (Business Professionals of America) during their high-school senior year. Having not much pride in their school or the BPA organization itself, the trio decided to make a comedic website to compete.

The website was "MrTechHappy.com" and was a robot business... with many bits of humor scattered throughout the entire site. That year, we took... eh... 4th in State I believe... or maybe it was 5th... I really don't remember anymore. Anyhow, after we had no use for the domain name and we had already spent the money on it, we decided to recycle it and make it and use it for our webcomic.

However, we do have plans on somehow incorporating "MrTechHappy" into our comic as an actual entity... you'll have to wait and find out... there are a few small small hints in a few of the comics, although they'd be very hard to get if you knew nothing about our previous BPA website.

Since our old style was not working out, Brook and Oliver (Van had recessed into his non-broadband home and remained hidden for quite some time - Mark was hibernating) decided there needed to be a change.

At the moment, Brook, being in high school, had much spare time and began to once again doodle in Flash. He created little miniature versions of people he knew. After looking at them, Oliver decided they would be very good characters for MrTechHappy. So with a little bit more refinement and group work (with critiques from Mark), MrTechHappy was born again after it came to a quick death.

Now that MrTechHappy was off to a good start again, we decided to change hosts from the free service, DotEasy.com, to a host that allowed us to do more advanced scripting, was faster, and allowed more space - Addr.com.

After a night and a few hours later, Oliver had coded much of the site's backend PHP (which constantly, at least seemingly to Oliver, is needing tweaking to satisfy the evil cravings of the other TechHappy authors) and transferred the older comics into Oliver's psuedo-database.

With all that done, we began trying to shift away from inside jokes to more "widely-gotten" jokes... we'll see how that turns out.

That's where we are now. =)

The Authors?

Ah... about us?...

Oliver Wong is currently a Computer Science major at the University of Texas at Austin and likes to call his major, "Counter-Strike." Having not a great deal of school pride, even in college, he is semi-phobic of swarms of orange which sometimes spring up from nowhere on weekends during the Fall semester. He's the webdesigner and coder for MrTechHappy and has also been doing a majority of the artwork for the comics, basing them off of Brook's original concepts.

Brook Shelley is a Senior at McNeil High School in Austin (Round Rock ISD) and hopes/plans on going to UT along with the rest of the college-goers in this comic next Fall. He's responsible for the majority of the comic's origins and concepts and does a lot of the writing/scripts for each comic. He has two darned cats which fur up everything and everyone.

Mark Brandt dropped out of high school and got a G.E.D. to play video games - at least that's the reason we like to think he did it for. He achieved the unthinkable - became a full-time gamer and dropped out of school to do it! GO MARK! We believe all that "I just wanted to actually learn stuff" is just a bunch of B.S. that he throws at his parents. =) Although, he did manage to score a 1560 on the SAT, whipping the snot out of everyone else here... so we are forced to concede he does have some brains. ;) He also plans on attending UT in the near future and provides critiques and scripts to MrTechHappy.

Chad Wilson is majoring (for the moment =) in Mathematics at UT. As horrific as it may sound to his past teachers, he plans to join their ranks in the future and also teach (hide your kids... heh, just kidding ;). He, like Mark, provides critiques and comic ideas. Oh, he also has Metal Gear Solid 2, but has yet to finish it.

Van Nguyen is going the double-E (Electrical Engineering) route at UT... but may in fact end up double-majoring in Computer Science and/or spending the rest of his life in college. After fading away from the MrTechHappy scene for a little while, he should be joining us again shortly as an author due to his recent broadband attainment. We look forward to his return to bring us better/more artwork and comic ideas.